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North Carolina has proven to be a great place to successfully farm mushrooms outdoors. But the state’s diverse forests, soils, temperatures and climates can make it difficult to determine which varieties or strains to grow where and when.
Students and researchers at Dr. Omon Isikhuemhen’s lab at North Carolina Agriculture & Technical State University have been working to help farmers from the mountains to the piedmont to the beach answer those questions for decades.
“The research about mushrooms in North Carolina is happening here,” Isikhuemhen said.
Isikhuemhen joined the university in 2002 and is a professor in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. Undergraduate and graduate students work in his lab to study and develop new strains of mushrooms and determine which varieties do best in different areas in the state.
Isikhuemhen helped start shitake log production in North Carolina. Soon after he joined the staff, N.C. A&T began an initiative to show farmers how simple it could be for them to start growing mushrooms on their land. The university worked with the county extension offices across the state to reach farmers.
In a six-year period, over 1,000 farmers in North Carolina were trained in outdoor production of shitake mushrooms. N.C. A&T provided each of them with the seeds they needed to get started. At the height of that effort, over 400 farmers were actively producing shitake mushrooms outdoors across the state, and North Carolina became one of the largest producers of shitake mushrooms outdoors.
Producing shitake mushrooms outdoors is much simpler and cheaper than indoor production, he said. First, many farmers in North Carolina already had the main resource they would need: a forest. Then, he said, they would need about $200 worth of tools to get started. The university was providing the seeds and training.
“So, for less than $200, a farmer could be a mushroom producer,” Isikhuemhen said.
Not only is it cheaper and more effective to produce shitake mushrooms outdoors, Isikhuemhen said that process also produced a more beautiful, robust and profitable mushroom. But shitake mushrooms respond to climatic conditions, Isikhuemhen said. Which means outdoor production is seasonal, while indoor production can happen year-round.
Interested in how to make this endeavor successful for North Carolina farmers, Isikhuemhen and his students began studying mushrooms and ways to help them thrive in our climatically diverse state. Students at N.C. A&T monitored the success of different strains across the state, with farmers helping by reporting back their production. Researchers were able to study the results and determine how the climate in the various parts of North Carolina were impacting mushroom production.
“Up in the mountains was colder, and down at the coast was warmer,” Isikhuemhen said. “So once we had an idea of the strain that does better in each region, we distributed them to farmers accordingly.”
In addition to that research, Isikhuemhen said the lab has been home to some breeding research as well. A graduate student working on his master’s degree at N.C. A&T was interested in breeding, and ultimately developed over 600 new strains of mushrooms, each targeted for use in different temperatures and climates.
“As we speak, North Carolina A&T State University has the largest culture collection of shitake strains in the American continent,” Isikhuemhen said.
Researchers are working to breed strains to be more resilient against high and low temperatures, wind, and other climatic conditions.
Isikhuemhen’s lab also conducts studies about different varieties of mushrooms and works to determine how to make their production more successful in North Carolina. While shitake is the most common variety grown in North Carolina, the lab is studying varieties like oyster, reishi and lion’s mane mushrooms for production indoors and outdoors across the state.